Ofcom said the "overwhelming majority" of the programmes' content was pro-Palestinian and highly critical of Israeli policy, and Mr Galloway spoke "from an entirely pro-Palestinian point of view".

I didn't realise he worked for the BBC. But, seriously, so what if he was biased? Press TV is the mouthpiece of the Tehran government and no one switches it on expecting to hear anything but anti-Israeli propaganda. Let them. So what if a few thousand people watch or listen to programmes with an obvious anti-Israeli slant? It's more creepy that millions ingest the subtle anti-Israeli slant of the state broadcaster.

What's at fault here are the British rules governing impartiality, which are established to ensure that there is only one opinion allowed in broadcasting – the official centre-Left one. In the United States, Right-wing radio and television hosts provide an alternative to the centre-Left dominated media, indeed, an important factor in American conservatism's survival was the repeal of the Federal Communications Commission's fairness doctrine in 1987, which allowed for the growth of conservative radio hosts who took on Clinton's Democrats. In Britain we have the Today programme, and the rules make it impossible to set up an alternative. That is why the blogosphere is so dominated by conservatives.

Because the American media is more free, the culture wars in the United States were a prolonged and evenly matched battle between two political schools of thought, modern liberalism and conservatism. The British equivalent, meanwhile, was the most one-sided war since the sixth Sultan of Zanzibar took on a Royal Navy squadron with only a couple of hundred palace slaves wielding curly swords.

And while the British culture war might have lasted slightly longer than the Anglo-Zanzibar War (36 minutes), conservatives were utterly routed in British life in the Eighties and Nineties. Way before New Labour came to power, all the leading figures in the civil service, education, the police, health service and the mainstream churches were 68er Marxism-lite liberals. And, most importantly, that was the only narrative presented by the BBC, which has far more power than any newspaper.

And as long as there are "impartiality" rules, the conservatives have only bloggers, the modern equivalent of house slaves with curly swords, to fight this media colossus.